1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure relates generally to a method and apparatus for diversity reception in an electronic device.
2. Description of the Related Art
Wireless communication techniques are widely used not only in various industrial fields but also in real life. For example, a portable terminal such as a smart phone, which has become a necessity of modern life, communicates wirelessly with a communication system of a vendor. Further, near field wireless communication is widely used, along with broadband wireless communication (e.g., a mobile phone).
To improve communication quality, wireless communication techniques have been developed in both hardware and software. For example, a communication technique using a plurality of antennas has been developed, and a technique for more effectively extracting data from a signal is under development. A diversity reception scheme is one example of a reception scheme that uses a plurality of antennas. In the diversity reception scheme, a signal is received through different paths to acquire a plurality of reception (RX) signals, and the RX signals are combined to increase the gain of the signal. The dimension of a path may be classified in terms of space, time, or frequency. For example, in case of a plurality of antennas, a plurality of paths may be formed in the spatial dimension.
If an electronic device (e.g., a mobile phone) performs diversity reception using a plurality of antennas, the wireless communication device may include a plurality of hardware modules for processing the signals received through the antennas. In this case, where signals received through different antennas are processed using different hardware modules, path independence is ensured, and when combined, the gain of the signal may increase. In general, diversity reception improves as the number of signal paths increases.
In addition, an electronic device that uses a plurality of antennas may improve its reception capability by performing Carrier Aggregation (CA). CA is a wideband communication scheme that uses different carrier frequencies. Each CA carrier is called a component carrier (CC). Since resources of the respective carriers are independently scheduled, the electronic device may receive data simultaneously through the respective carriers. For this, the electronic device supporting the CA may include Radio Frequency (RF) and baseband signal processing modules corresponding to the respective carriers.
As described above, an electronic device operating in a Carrier Aggregation (CA) mode may perform communication with a wide bandwidth by simultaneously using carriers of different frequencies. However, even if CA is supported, the electronic device may not always operate in the CA mode. Occasionally, the electronic device may not always operate in the CA mode. Occasionally, the electronic device may operate in a non-CA mode. In the non-CA reception mode, according to a user's usage environment (e.g., a manner of holding the device with a hand, locations of a head and a terminal, and the like), an error may occur in a signal reception of an antenna. In this case, there is a problem in that reception (RX) signal quality may be significantly decreased.